If you ever wanted to see Robert Pattinson beat it to a scrimshaw model of a mermaid that may exist, or may merely be a representation of his inner demons, twice!, this is the movie for you!
What a perfect way to start post #6,000.
Now that everyone is either sufficiently intrigued, or has run screaming from this blog, we can continue. Winslow (Pattinson) is on a 4 week tour tending a lighthouse somewhere at sea. His superior, Tom (Willem Dafoe), is a bearded, bug-eyed, limping old man who alternates insults and mockery with compliments and tales of his life at sea before his injury. The specifics of how he was injured change, but what doesn't change is that tending the light is his duty. Everything else, hauling oil, shoveling coal for the foghorn, repairing the roof on their home, falls to Winslow.
The movie plays with time, in that there's no clear sense of how long they've been at the lighthouse. They reach what is meant to be the end of their four weeks, which Winslow and Tom celebrate by getting blind drunk, but a terrible storm rises and their relief doesn't arrive. Does his killing a seagull in a fit of frustration (and he kills the hell out of that bird, no question), have anything to do with it? Well, Tom would certainly think so.
After that, Winslow's grip on reality, already tenuous due to past decisions he hasn't come to grips with yet, begins to slip. The rain keeps coming, the roof leaks get worse, there's less coal in the wheelbarrow and more water. Winslow starts drinking regularly, after refusing to do so the first 4 weeks. Pattinson gets sloppier with his dress, with his movements, indifferent to the weather. Time slips, too. We see what seems to be one day of this routine, but Tom insists it's already been weeks, confusing Winslow as much as us.
The movie's shot all in black and white, or really grey. Even before the storm arrives, it's never sunny. Grey sky, grey sea, grey buildings, with the characters especially blocked in by the 1.19:1 aspect ratio the film's shot in. The attempt to paint the lighthouse seems futile even before the platform breaks under Winslow. The interior of the house is dimly lit by those skies or flickering oil lamps that only make Dafoe look wilder when he really get going.
Dafoe does great work shifting between being a hardass, gentle encouragement, a poor, wounded old man, or an all-seeing sage. He'll let Winslow lug a huge drum of oil up the stairs before offering him the more manageable metal spout, then tell him to lug the drum back down. But he'll also offer him compliments and praise, that he'll do a fine job tending his own lighthouse some day. He can get so offended when Winslow won't say he likes how Tom prepares lobster that he calls on Neptune to curse Winslow, but also sit there calmly rocking in a chair and imply it was Winslow who chased Tom with an axe, not the other way around like we just saw.
It gets especially strange near the end, with lines like, "You smell like a hot onion fucked a farmyard shithouse!" or one character making the other follow him around on hands and knees like a dog. It might have been a little too comic for what seemed like a bleak descent into madness as the isolation leaves Winslow too much time with his own thoughts and failings.
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